Ness epitomized persistence and a proper perspective
One morning, circa 1993, I was out jogging at the UNM South golf course. Coming in the opposite direction was another man doing the same. On crutches. Holy moly, I thought. This guy’s serious. As the figure came closer, I realized I knew the guy.
“Hi, Rick,” said Gary Ness, the University of New Mexico’s man for all seasons — football player, baseball player, physical education professor, athletic director — as he barreled past me, pounding away on those crutches.
It was going to take more than hip-replacement surgery, it was clear, to slow him down. As a lasting image of Ness, who died on Friday at age 76, that works for me.
For Rebecca Cox, Ness’ daughter, the memories of her dad are, of course, many and varied.
In a phone interview on Wednesday, she talked of a man who loved Civil War history and bluegrass music, a man who played the harmonica in a gospel band he’d helped organize at Albuquerque’s First Presbyterian Church.
She also related a memory that, to her, encapsulated why her father — an educator at heart — had accepted the athletic director’s job at UNM in 1988.
“I remember walking into his office one day, and he was getting up from a meeting with Terance Mathis,” she said.
Mathis, of course, remains one of the greatest
football players in UNM history. But the crowning season of his Lobo career, in 1989, almost didn’t happen.
The previous year, Mathis had lost his football eligibility for failing to make adequate progress toward a degree. He left UNM for a junior college — he did not play football there —regained his eligibility and returned to Albuquerque.
Ness, his daughter said, was thrilled on two levels: as an athletic director, that the superbly talented wide receiver would once again be a Lobo; and, as an educator, that Mathis had completed the academic work necessary to make it so.
“My dad was just so excited,” she said, “that Terance had reconciled his life and gotten his grades up, worked hard and how he was going to come back and play.
“... That was really neat. I think (Ness) personally felt that things like that were why he was there.”
Her father’s greatest accomplishment as athletic director, Cox said, might have been working with Tow Diehm, his assistant AD and a dear friend, to secure funding for the much-needed athletic complex that ever since has borne Diehm’s name.
Women’s basketball, cut for budgetary reasons in 1987, came back in 1990 under Ness’ watch. For better or worse, he had declined in 1988 to cut any of UNM’s 23 varsity sports — firm believer as he was in athletics as part of the educative process.
Ness’ standing took a hit when he awarded football coach Mike Sheppard a contract extension in 1990 — only to fire him and pay him a $155,000 buyout (a pittance, compared to future UNM coaching buyouts) a year later.
But Ness then hired Dennis Franchione, who in 1997 would take the Lobos to a Western Athletic Conference divisional title and UNM’s first bowl game since the Aviation Bowl (in which Ness played) in 1961.
By ’97, Ness was long gone — ousted from the AD’s chair by thenUNM President Richard Peck. Ness’ last day as athletic director was Dec. 31, 1992.
“He was heartbroken for a while and didn’t speak about it,” Cox said. “It crushed him, because he understood that it was an injustice and that’s all it was.”
But her father never complained about his treatment, even privately, she said — partly, she believes, in deference to UNM football teammates (Jim Cromartie, Scott Henington, Bobby Santiago, Jim Ottmann, George Carmignani, et al) who had remained his closest friends. “They still are,” she said. In the past year, Cox said, her father’s health had deteriorated rapidly — a shocking thing to see for a man who, notwithstanding a mild heart attack in 1995, had been the picture of health for most of his life. “Really tough,” she said. Yet, she, her husband, Dustin, her mother, Donna, and the entire family will always have their memories.
I’ll have mine as well: that determined man thundering toward me on crutches at UNM South.